Normally, when Telstra announces a new plan for any service, we carefully comb over the details to work out just how consumers might end up worse off. But its newly-announced landline plans actually sound relatively reasonable — albeit still deals you could beat on a mobile-only plan with a little research.
Picture: Getty Images
Telstra has three new no-contract landline plans on offer, at $40, $50 and $85 a month. All include line rental and unlimited local calls; the $50 and $85 plans also include unlimited STD calls. The main benefit of the $85 plan is unlimited calls to mobiles as well. If you want to pay $15 extra a month on any of these plans, you can make unlimited landline calls to 32 countries as well.
The big issue with landlines is paying for calls to mobiles, and that problem hasn’t entirely gone away here. Call costs to Australian mobiles on these plans are capped at a maximum of $2 for 20 minutes, which is great for chatterboxes but isn’t any help at all for brief calls. The shortest call to a mobile (one minute or less) costs $0.79 on the $40 and $50 plans.
If you have decent mobile reception, a cheap prepaid plan is likely to handle all your needs without needing even the extra $40 a month for the cheapest plan in the new range. But those options could be (and have been) a lot worse.
Making a house call: Telstra’s new land line plans [Telstra Exchange]
Comments
10 responses to “Telstra’s New Landline Plans Don’t Sound Like Complete Rubbish”
How about Telstra stop being douche-bags and NOT force me to have a landline to have my FTTH Telstra internet connection?? I DON’T EVEN USE MY LANDLINE but have to pay $29.95 for the privilege.
Wait what? With FTTH I thought you didn’t need a landline connection (phone line) anymore. If so, you should have just gone with a better (any) provider.
That’s the problem, Telstra is the ONLY provider – it’s one of their stupid Telstra Velocity suburbs. NBN hasn’t taken over that infrastructure yet.
Consider yourself lucky to have any FTTH availability. I’d gladly pay $30 ontop of my current phone + ADSL2+ bundle for those kind of actually usable speeds 😛
Yeah well what they advertise and what I get are 2 different things. While I am not complaining about the speeds, I don’t get what they advertise or what I pay for.
I pay for 100mb down and I think 5mb up and I actually get about 30mb down and 1.5mb up.
Now that is fine speed down, (up a bit shitty), and I understand Telstras caveat of “up to that speed” but having to then pay $30 for a landline I don’t use/want or need technologically speaking – it’s starts to add up.
Yeh its nothing great, i’m not trying to defend it. But your not really ever gonna get actually near that 5mb, but it should be closer to the 3mb limit.
Eitherway, i get your problem, but don’t complain while im on probably a more expensive plan (even without the forced landline), and only get 5Mb/s down and 0.2Mb/s up 😉
I live in Alice Springs and the fastest I have seen is 20mb on ADSl 2 and that is a guy who lives literally next to the pip.
Lucky son of a gun 😛 Fastest connections (non NBN) i’ve seen have always been universities.
Yeah pretty sure it was pure luck.
I don’t have FTTH yet either, but I agree with jem81 Telstra are douche-bags.